Pages

Ads 468x60px

Labels

Thursday, August 15, 2013

How to grow magic mushrooms: basics for beginners

To grow your own hallucinogenic mushrooms you should make a decision which way of growing you prefer. But we start here with general growing techniques, which you can use to get started and to get a feeling for psilocybin mushrooms. First we explain you the most important rules when growing hallucinogenic mushrooms. After that, you could use our checklist to organize everything you need, prepare your workspace and all that kind of stuff. Than we go through step by step.

The essential rules of growing magic mushrooms

- The very first and most important rule is: Keep everything clean, always! Work sterile, so that no mold can contaminate your magic mushroom grow environment.
- Better wash and clean your utilities twice.
- Always make the air on your workspace as sterile as possible with your Bunsen burner flame.
- Never open something in any state of the growing process when it is dusty, for example you cleaned some old books and some dust is still flying in the air. Better wait for the next day.
- Never use contaminated mushrooms; they require an environment that is also the favorite from unwanted mushrooms and also a lot of bacteria. Very often these are poisonous and can lead to serious adverse health effects.
- If something was contaminated, do not worry; that can happen from time to time, just throw your magic mushrooms away. It doesn´t cost much money, the psychedelic mushrooms re-grow very fast and the time you invested is quite minimal.

The required equipment for growing magic mushrooms

For first time growers or beginners in general, you should pick a strain of magic mushrooms that is easy to grow. Do not just start with a Copelandia Cyanescens or similar right away, they are the strongest hallucinogenic mushrooms, but are way more difficult to grow. A good strain for beginners is Psilocybe Cubensis, it has a lot of variations, but all are rated as easy to grow.

- One spore print or syringe from your favorite Psilocybe Cubensis mushroom.
- Petri dishes with already prepared agar-agar in it, regular sold in packs with 5 or 10. So one pack is enough.
- One Bunsen burner with gas bottle.
- One large and wide needle, a knitting needle will do well.
- 3 or 4 big preserving jars.
- Several kg rice flour, best you get a big pack with 10 kg or more, so you got a stock.
- Several liters Vermiculite, also more is better to have a stock.
- A cooking pot, best suited is a pressure cooker. It must be completely sealed and the hot steam will reach every corner to make your tools sterile.
- 2 or 3 boxes where your magic mushrooms will grow. So a large styrofoam box could be used, or you build one with a few planks, only important is that it can be opened and closed. Now cover all inner parts of the box with an airtight foil. The foil is required to secure your box from water and humidity, but it also keeps the humidity inside for your hallucinogenic mushrooms.
- One very sharp knife, best suited is a scalpel.
- Organic rye
- Not required but useful are sterile one-way gloves, surgical masks and when you got long hair, also some surgical head coverage.

When you got everything ready, you can start with our step by step psilocybin mushroom guide.

Growing hallucinogenic mushrooms – Step by Step guide

Step 1:
Prepare your grow room and take a room that is not dusty or where you already got problems with mold.

Step 2:
Set up the Bunsen burner and ensure a stable standing, in no event it should be able to fall on its side!

Step 3:
Get the needle, magic mushrooms spore print and Petri dishes. But keep the lids on the petri dishes for now. They only should be opened if necessary and closed as soon as possible again.

Step 4:
Put the magic mushroom spore print ready on your table. Now hold the front of your needle into the flame of the Bunsen burner. Keep it in there until it starts to get a bit red. Now let it cool down again. Now hold it into the flame again, but 3 to 5 seconds will be enough. Wait a few seconds again that it has not much more than room temperature and press it into the spore print, now open the Petri dishes and put the needle tip into the agar-agar and close the Petri dish again. All of that has to be done real quick, the Petri dish shouldn’t be longer opened than 3 seconds and it could be good to not take off the lid completely, just lift it and move it a bit, so that there is just a space of 1 or 2 cm that is exposed directly to the air.

Step 5:
Do this with 3 Petri dishes and place them in a dark room with average temperature. Direct sunlight could be bad because it could heat up the Petri dishes badly. Humidity won´t be a problem, as the Petri dish is a nice small growing chamber. Within 4 to 10 days you will see how the magic mushroom started to colonize through the agar-agar.

Step 6:
When the magic mushroom spores already colonized over the whole Petri dish, they are ready for the next step.

Step 7:
Prepare a mix of 1 part Vermiculite and 1 part rice flour and 3 parts organic rye. Spread your mix in amounts that perfectly fit into the jars. Even if you make it sterile after this step, try to avoid unnecessary dust, dirt or bad environment like rooms with mold. Before closing the lid, add 2 small coffee cups of water into each jar.

Step 8:
Put the preserving jars into the pressure cooker, seal it and put it on low heat. Since the preserving jars are made of glass, they could break when heated up and cooled down too fast. When the pressure cooker is on full heat, let it there for 60 minutes. The steam isn´t as hot as your Bunsen burner, so it requires some more time to make things sterile.

Step 9:
After the jars are sterile, let them cool down to room temperature, but never open the lid of the jars, otherwise you would risk a contamination.

Step 10:
Take the scalpel and your Petri dishes, which are now colonized with your hallucinogenic mushrooms. Sterilize the scalpel over the Bunsen burner, let it cool down, now open the lid of the Petri dishes and cut the colonized agar-agar into squares, so that you got around 5 to 10 of small colonized pieces.

Step 11:
Put on sterile gloves now and maybe use long forceps that are also sterile. Get the jars, open the lid and push some colonized agar-agar pieces into them and close them again. Do this step like you did when putting the hallucinogenic mushrooms spores in the Petri dishes.

Step 12:
Keep the jars in a place like you did with the Petri dishes, within a few days you will see how the colonization of the magic mushrooms dig through your feeding media. Here it is not very important when going to the next step, just let it colonize until half of the jar is filled.

Step 13:
Prepare the same grow media mix you put in the jars, also add the same amount of water and put it in the pressure cooker. 15 minutes after full heat is reached, you can take it out and spread it on the ground of your grow boxes. The psychedelic mushrooms are still vulnerable to contamination, but not so fragile anymore.

Step 14:
Take out the colonized material from one jar and mix it under the media prepared in the grow box. Do this quickly and don´t keep the box longer opened than necessary.

Step 15:
Keep the box at 24 °C when using the type Psilocybe Cubensis as your magic mushrooms to grow; check every day if the box has a high humidity and that the media is always soaked with water. If you see the humidity does not fit, spray them with distilled water. Normal water from the bathroom contains unwanted guest already, depending on the quality of water in your area, which could even ruin a fully colonized box.

Step 16:
Within a few days the magic mushrooms colonize the media in the whole box and than they start to form the parts of the mushrooms you love them for. When around half of the flush has reached a size where the hat is about to open, harvest them.

Step 17:
Take the magic mushrooms just above the ground and twist them gently, so that they come out almost from themselves and you shouldn´t pull with violence. When done, spray the box with water again until the media is wet again. The next flush will come within 2 days and is ready to harvest within 1 week. Repeat this to a maximum of 4 flushes. Even if there are more, they are not worth the time, just set up the grow box freshly prepared.

Here you go, your own hallucinogenic mushrooms within just a few weeks! And when you got 2 or 3 boxes, you should be able to harvest around 1 kg fresh psilocybin mushrooms per week. Remember that 1 kg of fresh hallucinogenic mushrooms is 100 grams in weight when dried.

37 comments:

I have birthed my mycelium cakes about a week ago and I have not seen any small needle heads pokeing through the cake yet , however I have some form of collinization growing on the cakes and it doesn't not appeare to be mold it is white and is starting to sprout some form of something ... any sudjestions......or comments

Take core temp.of cake (core temp. should be required temp.for specific strain)Always remember your cake is a living organism ~ Because the cake produces its own heat, it wont start to knot/pin until core is @ its required temp.Also, it is as equally important that humidity, 02 & 12 hr. light cycle are present: THESE ARE TRIGGERS FOR THE MYCELIUM TO PRODUCE.......... tell the Silly-fun-guys, I said,HI!!!!

Psilocybe cubensis is a mildly potent species of psychedelic mushroom whose principal active compounds are psilocybin and psilocin. Commonly called boomers, magic mushrooms, golden tops, cubes or gold caps, it belongs to the Strophariaceae family of fungi and was previously known as Stropharia cubensis. It is largely known for being among the easiest psilocybin mushroom species to grow and cultivate.

On my location on a rock in the middle between the Atlantic and Caribbean the ingredients for the growth medium are hard if not impossible to find. For me it is better to find a kit for personal use, I don't think to set up a real farm

Also wondering the same thing. Would it be like using the print and knitting needle? Putting the spore syringe into the agar? Also, do I need to sterilize the needle every time I do another Petri dish?

I found a substrate recipe with the ingredient "Organic Rye". Would one of you very knowledgeable people please tell me what form rye is correct? I found organic rye berries, grain, flake & flour. Thanks!

My neighbors gave me Mason jars ready to go , he told me just mist them once a day n I'll see results in a few days. I did and only one sprouted. I read up there about contamination, the jars he gave me had holes in the lid. Are they jars ruined, or compromised?